Canada Day

KÖLN - A little dated, I know, but we had an interesting Canada Day over here in Germany. Barely cognizant of the fact that it was even our national holiday, late that night we noticed a red and white flag discarded on the floor of the Gelsenkirchen train station. Assuming it was a England flag (they had played in the city hours earlier and, of course, their flags were everywhere), Leo picked it up and to our amazement it was indeed the maple leaf. Shortly after examining the flag, a short man with a Canadian accent (you have to understand we were surrounded by ruddy Brits all day), asked us, "What is this, the Owen Hargreaves fan club? (he's the only Canadian-born player in the World Cup, and plays for England)" Turns out he was a journalist from the Toronto Sun, who I surprisingly respect because he writes for their Sports section. He'd been to tons of games, seen all of Germany and was to great to gab about the fitba with, even though I kept thinking about trying to steal the media pass hanging around his neck so I could actually attend a game here.

The night continued with us making a convoluted journey back to Osnabrück, aided in large part by these two fantastic Germans who had helped us to buy train tickets earlier in the day when we were so clueless; we would have missed our train, and the game, if not for them. As we were about to leave the train, Leo didn't know what to do with the flag as he didn't want to carry it around anymore, but it was so obvious - we should give it to them, especially as we had spent a large part of the three-hour ride blabbering on about all things Canada. It was accepted with a broad smile and a standing invitation to visit Hamburg, so we'll probably head to the party capital of Germany to meet up with them again. Good job that the World Cup motto is "A time to make friends."

To the present though, and we're visiting Cologne, the *surprise* place where the smelly stuff was invented. We were told it's known for two things: shopping and gay culture. I spent all day doing the former, hopefully I don't find out too much about the latter when we hit the town town's bierhalles tonight.